5 Tips To Stop Losing Leads

A lot of effort can be put into attracting traffic to your site and often the amount of leads which this traffic produces can seem woefully low. Any traffic on your site which is a potential lead therefore should be prevented from bouncing. It’s important to keep potential leads intrigued and interested by your site; figuring out how to do this can be difficult. We’ve put together 5 tips to stop losing leads from your site so that you can begin to work on converting and qualifying more of them.

1. Create a Relevant Reward

Potential leads are willing to hand over their details if there is a fair reward for doing so. Leads at different stages of becoming a valued customer have different views on what is fair for the surrender of their information though. Most early stage leads will not be willing to give you more than an email address no matter what the level of reward as they are yet to have any form of relationship with you.

Early stage leads are best being offered content such as blog posts and infographics that can be accessed without handing over any details. Those further down the lead process which have begun to trust you through reading free and helpful content will be willing to provide an email address for something such as a short best practice guide or newsletter.

Once a lead has been through this process or has had some real interaction with you then they will be willing to turn themselves into a higher qualified lead by handing over further contact details and company information, in exchange for materials such as a whitepaper or a quote. Dividing up your potential leads in this way is the first way to stop losing leads.

2. Simplified Form Completion

Potential leads are less likely to sign up for newsletters and free whitepapers if there is a long and complicated form to do so. A contact form is the simplest way for capturing lead details and there are some simple methods for increasing the efficiency of your forms which help you to stop losing leads:

Take out unnecessary fields - the fewer fields there are to fill in, the more people that will complete it. According to HubSpot, conversion rate improves by almost half when the number of form fields is reduced from four fields to three.

Provide assistance - sometimes why information is needed or exactly what you are asking for can be confusing. Providing small helpful notes such as which fields are optional and how the contact information will be used will boost form completion.

Think mobile – the size of the mobile audience is of course growing, so websites should be designed with mobile browsing in mind. Think about the functionality of a contact form on a mobile device when designing it. How easy is it to fill in on a small screen?

3. Build Trust

You can’t turn a prospect into a lead if they don’t trust you. Prospects need to be nurtured into leads through a long process and the crux of this process is developing their trust in you.

As mentioned before, offering valuable pieces of content and other information for a fair exchange is a great way to build up a trusting relationship and stop losing leads. Offering these site visitors a chance to contact you directly through a phone number, email address or live chat for example rather than just giving the option of them leaving their email and you getting back to them also builds trust. Having the ability to interact with a real human and not just be sent automated emails from a CRM system means they can feel a relationship begin to develop with the people within the company.

Showcasing well known clients, service awards, high content download numbers and high social shares of blog posts also create trust at early stages.

4. Clear Calls to Action

The main point of this blog post is of course giving suggestions as to how to keep people on your site and in particular how to stop leads bouncing from it, and the main way of keeping potential leads on site is giving them something to do on your site and making it clear how they can do it.

The useful and free resources and content mentioned earlier, along with the other usual site elements such as product descriptions, contact and about us pages etc., are the things which visitors can do on your site. Once these are in place, potential leads need their attention drawing to these through clear CTAs.

CTAs should be designed to aesthetically stand out and should make it clear what they are leading the site visitor to. A small contact form with a button which just says “Submit” doesn’t explain why site visitors are leaving their details and what they are getting in return. Potential leads need to be led through the nurture process which you wish for them to go through, using your CTAs.

5. Set-Up the Next Step

Once you’ve worked on stopping leads from bouncing from your site and slipping through your fingers, you need to work on the next step.

If you have worked hard to generate more leads then you need to make sure that a high proportion of these are being qualified and turned into your new clients. A short lead response time (the time it takes you to first contact these new leads) is important for getting leads talking to you and turning them from lead to client. Prof. James B. Oldroyd at MIT, looked at how lead response time impacts sales; one of the key takeaways was that the odds of making contact with these potential customers increased 100 fold if the lead was called within five minutes, rather than within 30 minutes.

Are your potential leads going to be sent follow up emails after they have downloaded free content? Are they going to be given a call to see how you can help them? Matters such as this need to be decided before you begin wasting efforts on generating more leads which aren’t being effectively approached with the next step.